An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector (literature books to read TXT) 📕

— What was sex like for you before?

— It was the only thing, she said, that I got right.

— I suspected as much, he said, and out of pure jealousy, he hurt her: when I saw you in the street the first time I immediately saw you’d be good in a bed.

Lóri’s peasant vitality is what saved her from a world of excessively delicate emotions. He saw that he’d hurt her out of jealousy. And said:

— But tonight is my first time.

At first he’d treated her with delicacy and a willingness to wait as if she were a virgin. But soon Lóri’s hunger made Ulisses forget all courtesy, and it was with a voracity without joy that they loved each other the second time. And if that wasn’t enough, since they’d waited so long, almost immediately they really possessed each other again, this time with an austere and silent joy. She felt herself losing all the weight of her body like a figure from Chagall.

Then they lay there quietly, holding hands. For an instant she took her hand away, lit a cigarette, passed it to him, and lit another for herself — and then took his hand again. Soon he stubbed his out. It was dark, the way she’d wanted, and neither spoke a word. I never knew myself like now, Lóri was feeling. It was a knowledge without mercy or joy or blame, it was a realization you couldn’t translate into feelings separated from each other and hence without names. It was a vast and calm knowing that “I am not I,” she was feeling. And it was also the very least, because it was, at the same time, a macrocosm and a microcosm. I know myself as the larva transmutes into a chrysalis: this is my life between vegetable and animal. She was as complete as the God: except the Latter had a wise and perfect ignorance that guided Him and the Universe. To know herself was supernatural. But the God was natural. Lóri wanted to transmit this to Ulisses but didn’t have the gift of words and couldn’t explain what she was feeling or thinking, not to mention that she was thinking almost without words.

She guessed that he was about to fall asleep, and so she slowly took her hand out of his. He immediately felt her touch disappear and said half-awake and half-asleep:

— It’s because I love you.

So she, in a low voice in order not to wake him completely, said for the first time in her life:

— It’s because I love you.

A great peace took hold of her for having finally said it. Unafraid of waking him and unafraid of his answer, she asked:

— Listen, are you still going to want me?

— More than ever, he replied with a calm and controlled voice. The truth, Lóri, is that deep down I’ve been searching all my life for the intoxication of holiness. I’d never thought that what I’d achieve was the holiness of the body.

As for her, she’d struggled her whole life against a penchant for reverie, never letting it sweep her to the final waters. But the effort of swimming against the sweet current had sapped some of her life force. Now, in the silence in which they both found themselves, she opened her doors, relaxed her soul and body, and didn’t realize how much time had passed for she had surrendered to a profound and blind reverie that the Glória clock didn’t interrupt.

He stirred in the bed. Then she spoke:

— You once said that when people ask my name I shouldn’t say Lóri but “I.” Well it’s only now that I call myself “I.” And say: I am in love with your I. So we is. Ulisses, we is original.

The night was getting darker and darker and it was raining a lot. Though she couldn’t see him, she recognized by his measured breathing that he was sleeping. Her eyes were open in the dark and the darkness kept revealing itself to her as a dense compact pleasure, almost unrecognizable as pleasure, when compared to what she’d had with Ulisses. His sleeping beside her, was leaving her both alone and integrated. She didn’t want anything except just what was happening to her: to be a woman in the dark beside a man who was sleeping. She wondered for an instant if death could interfere with the heavy pleasure of being alive. And the answer was that not even the idea of death could manage to disturb the boundless dark field in which everything was throbbing thick, heavy and happy. Death had lost its glory.

She remembered how it was before these moments now. She was a woman seeking a way, a form. And now she had what in fact was so much more perfect: it was the great freedom of not having ways or forms.

She wasn’t fooling herself: was it possible that those perfect moments would pass? Leaving her in the middle of an unknown path? But she could always keep in her hands a bit of what she was getting to know now, and then it would be easier to live not living, barely living. Even if she were never again to feel the serious and serene power of existing and loving, as she did now, in the future she would already know what to wait for, waiting her whole life if necessary, and if necessary never again having what she was waiting for. She suddenly shifted in bed because it was unbearable to imagine for an instant that she might never repeat her profound existence on earth. But, to her unexpected joy, she realized she’d always love him. After Ulisses had become hers, being human now seemed to her the right way of being a living animal. And through Ulisses’s great love, she finally understood the kind of beauty she had. It was a beauty that nothing and no one could reach and take away, because it was so high, big, deep,